


On the Table (Snow)/Fever Dreams (Water)

by nookienostradamus



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Beautiful words for terrible things, Gen, Hannibal is Hannibal, Spoilers, Will is broken, disturbing imagery, seriously I cannot stop myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 06:06:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nookienostradamus/pseuds/nookienostradamus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal watches the snow. Will dreams of water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Table (Snow)/Fever Dreams (Water)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Hannibal 1x11, "Rôti."
> 
> These were originally supposed to be two separate pieces, but I wove them together, hopefully to good effect. Much more stream-of-consciousness than my previous. No smut, but still just wringing with "wrongness."
> 
> Still immersive (submersive?). I love, love, love, love, love writing Hannibal's interior world.

Every molecule shifts through multiple states, defined by its proximity to others of the same kind. Each has its particular transition point, the catalyst being temperature. Working gradually, teasing the thermostat this way or that, one can attenuate the moment of change and almost--but not quite--wake the substance to the fact of its inevitable conversion.

A frog set in scalding water will leap and thrash for escape, but one set in tepid water heated by slow degrees remains oblivious even as its flesh curls and its organs boil.

In just this manner can minds be guided--this way, that way--and under a deft hand may be kept not only at the very edge of slippage, but of recognition, for stretches of time that almost defy logic. Eventual phase change is inescapable, of course, but it need not be before the substance, mind or molecule, is set to caroming about as if on a billiard table, drunk with spin from the cue.

A millefiori paperweight balanced on four fingertips, Hannibal Lecter sits in his office and watches the snow fall untouched by any wind. The flakes’ behavior is erratic, or, rather, it gives that impression. The tumbling and knocking is only friction-buffeted pretense to free movement. Sprawling from the speck of filth at each flake’s heart is only rigidity, already unreachable. Hannibal finds he prefers the water molecule in its liquid state, neither crystallized nor so diffuse that it cannot be contained.

\-------

Water.

It is hot, _so hot_ , but Will dreams of water. It leaks into impossible spaces. If he were to wake, he might find comfort in the fact that he was dreaming. But most likely he would despair at failing to tell the difference between the water that spills behind his forebrain and the water that trickles in front of his eyes.

Waking is dreaming. Dreaming is no escape from waking.

Liquid. His head is full of it. It sloshes in his ears from the inside out.

And it laughs. God, the fucking stuff giggles without stopping.

No one can stand this for long. Will is superhuman, he thinks, to have borne up under it for a day, a minute, half a second.

Aping the sounds inside him, Will laughs in his sleep.

(It is good that Alana Bloom has gone for a cup of coffee, to grip it in palms swelling with superficial burns while she tries, and fails, to cry in a toilet stall. It is good she does not hear or see.)

The streams and trickles answer him back, and the sound is cold. No comfort as he burns. Will has not touched cold in more days than he can remember. Cold has touched him over those days, skin to skin, and of this he has no memory at all.

\-------

Identity is fluid. Hannibal excepts no one from this truth, even himself. Beside his own aqueduct--a cantilevered interplay of runnels and sub-runnels executed to reflect both maximum beauty and efficiency--he watches Frederick Chilton’s clumsy experiment burst its banks.

There is no concern whatsoever that its silt-laden fingers will reach him; he has already deployed his own countermeasure to sop up the leavings of Dr. Abel Gideon’s escape. There will always be initial damage, but Hannibal derives much more personal satisfaction from bringing something wild under the lash than applying formational training from the outset. Harnessing ambidirectional and squandered potential with precise strikes. He does not have children, but he does have patients, for just this reason.

Yes, much like a billiard table, even though it’s a mountebank’s game.

What is left of Gideon is much more than Hannibal would have liked to see. He cannot even take pleasure in Chilton’s evisceration because the mechanism was so ungainly, and this makes Hannibal unspeakably angry. The purity of design is sullied, because it is not his alone.

An end achieved without consideration and purpose is no end at all. It is a stain. Abel Gideon is a smear on the snow.

Hannibal loathes stains. And by capturing its liquidity, snow does no justice to blood.

\---------

Will is enclosed in a howling tunnel of water. Although the noise overwhelms, like his head on the thrumming ground beside the tracks as an endless train rolls by, he is calm. Here in the open eye, he could reach out to touch the glassy walls of moving surf. Not even mist reaches his exposed neck from where the divergent flow crashes back together behind him.

Across from him stands Garrett Jacob Hobbs, his feet dry and solid on the sea bed but with hair that stands out and sways as if he is underwater. His smile is kelp-green.

Will blinks. Rather, his eyelids close and he must fight for long seconds to drag them open.

Hannibal now stands before him, his expression concerned. He removes the handkerchief--red against the green sea--from his breast pocket and extends it.

Will wants to move, to reach out his hand, but the same crushing gravity that pinned his eyes shut will not allow his hand to rise, forbids a single step. He hears rather than feels his scalp begin to sizzle. When his hair catches fire, he tries to scream. A great shape passes over them both in the water above, turns Will’s agony to torchlight in a cave.

Then something--the handkerchief, maybe--is on his face. Cool at first but then the coldest thing he has ever felt. A parallel burn, worse by far than pitching headlong into snow beside Abel Gideon’s leaking corpse.

He is able to move then, but only stumbles and falls.

Hobbs stands above him, and Will hates himself for a moment because what he feels is relief.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs unzips the fly of his canvas work pants and pulls something out. It is a tongue, dripping green on the sand.

Will draws a breath for protest, and the water obliterates them both.

\-------

The snowfall has stopped. To Hannibal, it does not feel like reprieve, but like anticipation. A fever is a flood. It tears through, knocks things asunder. But the path of a fever cannot be directed. Hannibal constructs scenarios in his mind for amusement; he knows they are sandcastles. What will remain, and what will be washed away when Will’s fever breaks? Within the scaffolding of possibility he has erected, Hannibal need only anticipate that one of them holds, turns to glass.

There exists, of course, the chance that Will could surprise him. Remote, but not implausible.

For as effortless as it is to slide through layers of lies, what he said to Bedelia during their session was not an untruth. Hannibal does see himself in Will. It is as if the part of himself he excised as a child--the seeping and gangrenous vestige that would, if not cut away, fetter him to imperfection.

Will is Hannibal’s fatal flaw given breath and agency. A dissociation, it still reaches for him with damaged affection.

Certainly, now Hannibal can no more accept it back than he can reverse the course to this point. He is inoculated to suffering. Will’s mind may cool, change states, begin to tumble undirected once again.

But beneath the aegis Hannibal has extended over the grotesque little thing, there is darkness and dread, yes. But also there is shelter.


End file.
